Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

Poor New Orleans.

Classic football favorites such as Friday Night Lights depict one of Americans’ most beloved aspects of this age-old sport in its self-explanatory title. The lights! Without them, there’s no blinding white gleam sprawled out along the field, there’s no reason to cheer for your hometown team at your local high school rival playoff and there’s certainly no way to enjoy the Super Bowl. For 47 years, the Super Bowl has been the best of the best of All-American, good old fashioned competition –unless you’re a 49ers fan who’s a sore loser. This year during the Super Bowl 2013 – which set TV rating records – the country was shocked to see the power intermittently blow out throughout the game.

Beyonce worked it and did her thing during the infamous halftime show, where she reunited with Destiny’s Child and made us young adults scream with glee, but perhaps her insane light show proved a little too demanding for this southern location. Approximately 90 seconds into the second half of last night’s game, the lights on one half of the Superdome’s roof suddenly went out, the New York Times reported this morning.

While the A-list singer was trying to prove herself after her inauguration lip-synching scandal – and received a ton of impressed feedback as a result – it could be she did so well that the game just couldn’t continue.

“After the sudden break in the action, many of the 71,024 fans started murmuring. The public-address announcer made several muffled statements about the power failure. Strangely, the cheerleaders for the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens continued to shake their pompoms,” The Times continues.

The outage was a full 35 minutes, which apparently happened right after the Ravens’ Jacoby Jones displayed “one of the oddest moments in Super Bowl history” with his 108-yard touchdown kickoff. Even more bizarre is its predictive elements, where the light remained on the Ravens’ side while the 49ers and their fans were cast into the darkness. At the time, the Ravens were leading the game 28-6.

Apparently, choosing New Orleans was a very decisive factor in this year’s Super Bowl, as the NFL was trying to make a very distinct point. “In choosing New Orleans to host the game, the NFL wanted to signal that the city was back in business after Hurricane Katrina in 2005,” adds The Times. “The Superdome, which was turned into an emergency shelter after the storm, had been overhauled and rebranded through to a sponsorship deal with Mercedes-Benz.”

Rumor also has it that the home to this year’s dark Superdome is cursed “because it was built near the Girod Street Cemetery, which had fallen into disrepair.” Even more bizarre is that the power apparently didn’t go out anywhere else in the city – just the Superdome, according to Michael Burns, a spokesman for Entergy Services, the local utility.

In a joint statement, Entergy and SMG, the company that manages the Superdome, said:

A piece of equipment that is designed to monitor electrical load sensed an abnormality in the system. Once the issue was detected, the sensing equipment operated as designed and opened a breaker, causing power to be partially cut to the Superdome in order to isolate the issue. Backup generators kicked in immediately as designed. Entergy and SMG subsequently coordinated start-up procedures, ensuring that full power was safely restored to the Superdome. The fault-sensing equipment activated where the Superdome equipment intersects with Entergy’s feed into the facility. There were no additional issues detected. Entergy and SMG will continue to investigate the root cause of the abnormality.

The black out even spawned the hashtag #SuperBowlBlackOut while the Internet went into a feeding frenzy.